About Thom Barthelmess

Thom Barthelmess has worked in public libraries across the country and is now a lecturer at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Dominican University where he serves as curator of the Butler Children’s Literature Center.

Wait by Antoinette Portis; illus. by the author Preschool Porter/Roaring Brook 32 pp. 7/15 978-1-59643-921-4 $16.99 A harried mother rushes her toddler son through the busy city streets, and he resists, stalling to look at everything they encounter. This fundamental tension plays out in a series of spreads illustrating the same refrain. She […]

Handicapping the Newbery and Caldecott awards is a favorite pastime (blood sport?) among aficionados of books for children and teens. We gather in hallways, on blogs, around water coolers, to guess and argue and wonder. We postulate, some of us for twelve full months, until the ALA Midwinter meeting’s Youth Media Awards Press Conference when […]

Stonewall: Breaking Out in the Fight for Gay Rights by Ann Bausum Middle School, High School Viking 120 pp. 5/15 978-0-670-01679-2 $16.99 Bausum begins her history of the gay rights movement with a careful, detailed exposition of the June 1969 Stonewall riots, laying out the events leading up to the clash between the […]

In Mary’s Garden by Tina Kügler and Carson Kügler; illus. by the authors Primary Houghton 32 pp. 3/15 978-0-544-27220-0 $16.99 As a girl, Mary “was happiest when her hands were busy making, building, creating things.” As she grew up and traveled around the world, those early interests developed into a love for art. She returns […]

Bird & Diz by Gary Golio; illus. by Ed Young Primary Candlewick 26 pp. 3/15 978-0-7636-6660-6 $19.99 An impressionistic story of a “be-bop-a-skoodley” friendship comes together in the juxtaposition of a series of opposites — rendering and abstraction, saturation and resistance, darkness and light — reflecting the special partnership of two distinct musical legends. Golio […]

The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus by Jen Bryant; illus. by Melissa Sweet Primary Eerdmans 48 pp. 9/14 978-0-8028-5385-1 $17.50 Apt language and ingenious imagery combine to tell the life story of Peter Mark Roget, creator of the thesaurus. A solitary, though not unhappy, child, Roget spends his time keeping lists and ordering the […]

My choice for Caldecott 2015 consideration is Scott Campbell’s delightful, infectious, and secretly sophisticated Hug Machine. This is the kind of book that is easy to miss because it is disguised as a romp. It doesn’t pretend to be serious, and so doesn’t signal our serious attention. It’s up to us to apply that attention. […]

Many of us who read and consider books for young people in some professional capacity know group book discussion to be one of the most rewarding parts of the job. Few gratifications compare with enlightened, book-focused repartee in intelligent company. These discussions take many forms, from conversations around a kitchen table or in a college […]

The Cosmobiography of Sun Ra: The Sound of Joy Is Enlightening by Chris Raschka; illus. by the author Primary Candlewick 40 pp. 5/14 978-0-7636-5806-9 $15.99 g Jazz pioneer and self-proclaimed space case Sun Ra (born Herman P. Blount) gets a portrait as bemusing and sparkly as the man himself in this fantastical tribute. Raschka begins […]

We have all seen book covers we don’t like. Some suffer from unfortunate aesthetics, being too busy, poorly rendered, or just plain dull, deterring readers with their intimations of boredom within. Others misrepresent the text they introduce, unintentionally or deliberately promising a book they can’t deliver. The offense of a bad book cover feels especially […]